Page:Lady Barbarity; a romance (IA ladybarbarityrom00snai).pdf/321

 purple, you'll tell me next that you've never heard o' Peter Pearce and Johnny Margitts, and Joe the Tinker, and Ridin' Phipps o' Finsbury. Every mother's son on 'em in 'Newgate Calendar,' wi' their picters draw'd from the life fair, speakin' natural and all their pedigrees beneath. And you never to 'a' heard of William Milligan? What, never heard o' Bagshot Bill—old Bully William—wot in his prime would stop a beautiful fat bishop on the Heath and strip him of his duds. Why, Snark, you're learnin'."

"Oh, a highwayman, was he?" said I, most inadvisedly.

"Well, Miss," says he, "I should rather think he were. He was a reg'lar poet at it, William was. Not a very big man, Miss, William wasn't, mind you, but by crumbs! see him on his mare wi' the moon arisin' and a coach a-comin' down the hill. They can talk about their hartisses, and their Shakespeares, and their Drydens too, but, Miss, that's what I calls a poet and a man. And William were that modest too. Not a smell o' pride about him. 'Ud take his pot and have his jest wi' me and you just as if he were a common person."

"Oh, no; surely not?" says I, in an earnest accent.

"Lord, he would, Miss! That's what's so grand about true greatness. All the real Number One men are as mild and silken as a clergyman. Perky Niblick treated me to a pot o' porter the day afore he so gloriously died. And Jackson, too; look at